MAINZ, Germany — A 96-year-old woman was arrested Thursday after fleeing in a taxi before her trial on charges of aiding and abetting mass murder in a Nazi concentration camp, officials in Germany said.
The accused went"on the run” and avoided the planned opening day of the trial, a spokeswoman for the Itzehoe District Court told NBC News on Thursday. The woman was seen leaving her home in a taxi, she added. Local media reported that the woman had left an old people's home in the city of Quickborn and was heading toward a train station in the small town, which is around 60 miles south of the Danish border.The woman was later arrested around 35 miles away in a suburb of Hamburg, police told NBC News.
The court spokeswoman said she would be brought before a judge who would decide whether she was fit to be detained. Given the woman's age and condition, she had not been expected “actively to evade the trial,” she said in a separate interview with The Associated Press. Identified by German media outlets as Irmgard Furchner, she is accused of contributing as an 18-year-old to the murder of 11,412 people when she was a typist at theNear what is now the Polish city of Gdansk, about 65,000 people, including many Jews, were murdered or died at the camp, according to the Stutthof museum's